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What We Do

Chicago Shakespeare Theater (CST) is your Tony Award-winning theater company on Navy Pier. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Edward Hall and Executive Director Kimberly Motes, the Theater produces a bold and innovative year-round season—plays, musicals, world premieres, family productions, and theatrical presentations from around the globe—alongside education programming for students, teachers, and lifelong learners, and engagement with communities across the city.  

Across our three stages, in classrooms and neighborhoods across the city, and in venues around the world, CST is a multifaceted cultural center—inviting all to share powerful stories that connect and inspire. 

 

Our Stages

Making our home on Chicago’s iconic Navy Pier, our campus features three dynamic performance venues.

Explore Theaters See what’s playing

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In Classrooms and Communities

Recognized as a national leader in the field, CST’s arts-in-literacy programs support the work of tens of thousands of students and teachers each year. Through events and partnership performances, we foster community engagement with Chicago artists & neighbors.

A group of nine people energetically dancing on a wooden floor.

A Global Theater

CST is the city’s leading presenter of international work and tours its own productions around the world. Over two decades, CST has welcomed more than 1,300 artists from 22 countries as part of a vibrant cultural and creative exchange.

Two performers in a dramatic theatrical scene, one dressed as an angel with white wings and a black robe, and the other in a blue pinstripe suit kneeling, both with expressive and animated poses.

See It First Here

A celebrated incubator for new work development, CST fosters an artistic pipeline that nurtures artists and extends our creative impact. Audiences have been the first to enjoy more than 30 world premieres of new plays, musicals, and adaptations.

Land Acknowledgement

Chicago Shakespeare Theater and the city colonially known as Chicago are located on the traditional, unceded tribal lands of many Indigenous nations, including the Council of the Three Fires: the Potawatomi, the Ojibwe, and the Odawa, as well as the Menominee, Ho’Chunk, Miami, Peoria, and Illini Confederacy, peoples who have meaningful connections to this land, the waterways, and to one another. We ask you to join us in acknowledging the Indigenous communities who lived here, and those who still do. Today one of the largest urban, Native American communities resides in Chicago—vitally contributing to the life of this city and caring for the surrounding land and waters.